Discriminatory discursive strategies in online comments on YouTube videos on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement by Mainland and Hong Kong Chinese

Abstract

This article examines the discriminatory discursive strategies adopted in the online interactions between different power groups from Mainland China and Hong Kong in their response to two YouTube videos about the Hong Kong Umbrella, or Occupy Central, Movement. A corpus of 4329 comments made by 2157 posters from Mainland China and Hong Kong was coded regarding commenters’ place of residence and their perceptions of the Umbrella Movement and then tagged based on Flowerdew et al.’s previous taxonomy of discriminatory discursive strategies. The results show that a wide range of discriminatory discursive strategies, used by two power groups from Hong Kong and one from the Mainland, were found in the majority of the comments, including four sub-strategies not identified by Flowerdew et al. While studies to date on the Umbrella Movement have mainly focused on Hong Kong data, our study contributes to the literature by adding the perspective from Mainland China. The findings of this study provide insights into the increasing social and political tensions between Hong Kong and its mother country as well as the current situation in the divided city.